Hospitals scramble to protect critical care services as mutant Covid spreads

Emergency healthcare staff have already warned they are at ‘battle stations’ as they try to deal with the ongoing surge in Covid-19 patients.

Hospitals across the country are scrambling to protect critical care services as the mutant strain of coronavirus continues to drive up infections.

Emergency healthcare staff have already warned they are at ‘battle stations’ as they try to deal with the ongoing surge in Covid-19 patients.

Adrian Boyle, vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said people were ‘tired, frustrated and fed-up’, while Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, said the next few weeks would be ‘nail-bitingly difficult for the NHS’.

The UK recorded another 57,725 cases of the virus on Saturday – the highest number of new daily cases since the beginning of the pandemic and the third time that grim tally was surpassed this week. There was also a further 445 deaths.

One doctor warned that hospitals in London are under so much pressure that coronavirus patients are effectively in ‘competition’ for ventilators.

Dr Megan Smith, from London’s Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital Trust, said medics are being forced to make ‘horrifying’ decisions over who gets lifesaving treatment and who doesn’t.

It comes after the chief executive of University College London hospitals trust cautioned it was on the verge of treating only coronavirus patients and a leaked memo from the Royal London Hospital warned staff it was in ‘disaster medicine mode’.

Dr Alison Pittard, dean of the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine, said she feared the added pressures being seen at London hospitals in dealing with the volume of coronavirus patients had started to spread across the country.

Asked whether the problems were becoming more ‘widespread’, she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘That’s what appears to be happening.

‘Everyone has seen what is happening in London and the pressure that is putting both on organisations and on staff as well, and we fear it is only a matter of time before it starts to spread to other parts of the country, and we are already starting to see that.

‘It is really important that we try and stop the transmission in the community because that translates into hospital admissions.’

Health chiefs in Birmingham have said they are having to borrow staff from partner organisations, reopen deactivated wards, postpone routine surgery and divert non-Covid patients to other urgent care centres in order to cope with the pressure.

Dr David Rosser, chief executive of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Trust, told BirminghamLive: ‘This is as close to critical as I have ever seen the NHS in 25 years.

‘We are under greater pressure than at any stage in this pandemic.’

He said the number of coronavirus patients at the city’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital had risen by more than 100 to above 550 since Christmas Day.

The director of Public Health for Blackburn with Darwen council told the Daily Mirror it was ‘certain’ that another wave of the virus was making its way North.

A senior ICU consultant in the North of England also told the newspaper he had ‘grave concerns’ about what will happen over the next three months after seeing colleagues in London overwhelmed.

In Liverpool, the city council’s cabinet member for health, Paul Brant, warned that they need to ‘greatly reduce infection rates just to stand still’ following an ‘alarming’ surge in cases.

He told the Echo:  ‘The data since Christmas Day shows a very alarming growth in positive tests in Liverpool, and not all the data is in yet due to usual holiday delays.

‘Whilst the city starts from a stronger position than the rest of England because of our mass testing pilot, we are rapidly catching up with the rest of the nation.’

The infection rate in Liverpool has shot up from around 196 cases per 100,000 in the population to around 292 cases per 100,000 since last week.

It was below 90 at the end of the second national lockdown.

A hospital trust in Greater Manchester also urged people only to attend its emergency departments in serious and life-threatening emergencies only, warning they are ‘currently very busy’.

Pictures taken in Portsmouth on Saturday afternoon also showed more than a dozen ambulances queuing up outside the A&E department at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Hampshire, where around a third of general and acute beds are occupied by Covid-19 patients.

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